Miodrag b. Protic (1922-2014) - shutting down the last light of the Yugoslav modern

Abstract

Miodrag B. Protic is remembered as the leading figure of several major activity in the Yugoslav and Serbian culture from the late 1950s and the 1960s. As a member of the generation who had the opportunity to contribute to the disappearance of the social-realistic dogma, since the early 1950s Protic worked as a painter and art critic. Later he was a founder of the Modern Gallery in 1958, as well as a spiritus movens of the construction, opening and program concepts of the Museum of Contemporary Art located at Usce since 1965. Finally, he was a writer of pioneering papers on modern Serbian art and its protagonists, which we still read today. Since 1959, when he was appointed the managed of the Modern Gallery, i.e. the Museum of Contemporary Art in the process of foundation, Protic started his tireless and seminar work on constructing, opening and designing of the first new building and dedicated museum of modern art in Yugoslavia. He was also a writer and editor of a large number of publications of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Protic as a writer is characterized by a huge number of titles, meticulous research and clarity of interpretation, especially study exhibitions (decennial and retrospective) which he prepared with his team during his lifetime. "Protic's" (which it really was in the best sense of the word) Museum of Contemporary Art was the most comprehensive and most systematically organized museum organism in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere in the region. This magnificent machine for exhibitions, research material and documentation, collecting, storage, conservation, purchase and exhibition of the works of art, for writing about art, valuable contributions to historiography, museology and the discipline of the history of Serbian and Yugoslav art of the 20th century lasted automatically, just like any meticulously designed mechanism, for a number of years and finally, during the 1990s and in the new millennium, it almost hopeless stopped. Protic's "machine for exhibitions" stopped at the same time as his unquestioning belief in progress, responsibility, and professional ethics, industry, professional commitment and self-discipline. Symbolically and ironically, it stopped when the state that had created it as an emblem of its own power in the field of visual representation, when the modernist model of enlightenment was replaced by dystopian models of arbitrary opinions, superficiality, ignorance, opportunism, apriorism and voluntarism. Miodrag B. Protic as a painter was the main pillar of the post-war Serbian Modern. Starting from rational compositional structures of paintings, he shows the very artistic tendencies that came from the modernist tradition of the Form in the postwar period of the emancipatory Serbian painting, along with other information about the modern painting, especially that of post-Cubist procede which was derived from the Paris school. Protic opposed positivism of high modernism and the ideology of progress to skepticism and the altered spirit of the times, the disintegration of ideology and a drastic step forward from the ideology of modernism in general due to his artistic and critical beliefs.